Casa de la Zacatecana

Casa de la Zacatecana is an eighteenth-century civil residence in Querétaro's Centro Histórico, named for the wealthy woman from Zacatecas said to have lived there and become the subject of one of the city's most enduring colonial legends: a story of a forbidden love affair and the poisoning of her husband, whose body was, according to tradition, kept preserved and later discovered walled into the house. Beyond the legend, the house is a well-preserved example of eighteenth-century Querétaro domestic architecture, built around a period courtyard with a wrought-iron balustrade and a striking spiral stone staircase, a rare feature in colonial civil buildings of the region. The interior has been arranged as a small house museum, with period furniture, decorative arts, and religious objects displayed in rooms restored to reflect the domestic life of a prosperous colonial-era family rather than a purely narrative exhibit about the legend itself. The museum's curatorial approach mixes the two threads, walking visitors through furnished period rooms while noting the sites associated with the Zacatecana story, such as the courtyard and the walled areas of the house. Restoration work has focused on conserving the original stonework of the courtyard and staircase and refurnishing rooms with period-appropriate pieces, and the house remains one of the more intimate, human-scale colonial buildings open to the public in the historic center.